Hunting Season and Book Club
Written by Emily Burns Russell
As I write this, I’m watching my husband teach our five-year-old how to shoot a Red Ryder BB gun. They’re aiming at a Happy Meal box. My husband is helping him hold up the gun, which is almost too heavy for his little arms. Zip.
“Did I hit it?” he asks, running across the gravel driveway to check. He holds up the box to look at it. “Nope, I did not hit it.” He walks back to his dad who says, “It’s alright bud. Let’s try again.”
They do try again, until finally one BB makes more of a rip than a zip, and a cheer of “Yes! I hit it!” flies up. My son looks at his dad with hope in his eyes, eager to share a smile. “Did I hit it, actually?”
“Go and see,” he smiles back.
In a few weeks, as summer transitions to fall, my husband will start spending a lot more time in the woods and the wild—sometimes with friends, sometimes with family, sometimes alone—sitting and waiting to shoot different types of meat that will fill up our freezer. A friend will sometimes ask me, as my husband disappears into the mountains for days on end, when I’ll get my own “hunting” trip. “Don’t you get to go sit around with your friends for a week?”
“Oh don’t worry,” I reply with a wink. “I have a book club.”
And it’s kind of a joke, but book club is almost as big of a time commitment as my husband’s hunting trips, because last year, a friend casually asked if I wanted to join her Well Read Mom group.
“It’s kind of a Catholic, elevated literature thing,” she explained. “They do a national book list every year, and then they have a guide that walks you through each book to help you read and discuss with a Catholic lens. We nerd out; it’s fun. You’d like it.”
I was ecstatic, and I do love Well Read Mom. It’s as closest as I’ve gotten to college since college, and I mean the sit-in-a-room-and-talk-about-soaring-ideas part of college. Last year, we read a 16th century monk and T.S. Eliot. This year we’re doing Virgil and Pinocchio. Each year’s list has books you’ve heard of, new releases, and works you were probably assigned to read at some point but didn’t. The conversation, joy, challenge, and sisterhood this sparks is unmatched. It forces you out of the whirlwind of your day and into thinking about art, beauty, goodness, truth.
And truly, it can be a time commitment. Sometimes finishing a book in time for the monthly meeting can feel like cramming for an exam, except that homemade baked goods are waiting for you when you’re done instead of a bluebook. And like many things in life, Well Read Mom is not free. There is a fee to get the reading companion and booklist for the year, which is proprietary. But for those of us who are into voluntary Catholic literature class, it’s not super difficult to find a group. It’s a beautiful way to get with real women, in the real world, and fight against the modern forces that spur us to social isolation and dwindling attention spans.
Each year, Well Read Mom picks a theme for their September through June meetings, and this year the theme is Year of the Father. The beautiful reading companion features Vincent Van Gogh’s First Steps, after Millet on the cover to ground us in the theme. Maybe my son squatting in a gravel driveway looking for BB holes in a Happy Meal box isn’t as artistically beautiful as a Van Gogh.
But as that kindergartener found where he hit his mark and proudly held it up to show his grinning dad, I felt like the mom in the painting, watching her child share joy with his dad over succeeding at something difficult. Obviously, the theme of fatherhood is a tragic one for many, but the books this year inspire us to remember that no earthly fatherly love, no matter how beautiful or ugly, compares to the love of our heavenly Father. And as I watch my son show my husband how he can safely carry his BB gun inside, I rest in His gaze, looking forward to hunting season and book club for many years to come.
About Emily Burns Russell
Emily Burns Russell lives south of Richmond, Virginia, where she loves to adventure with her husband and young son. Sometimes, she writes about what she’s reading at emilyburnsrussell.substack.com.
About Well-Read Mom
In Well-Read Mom, women read more and read well. Our hope is to deepen the awareness of meaning hidden in each woman’s daily life, elevate the cultural conversation, and revitalize reading literature from books. If you would like to have us help you select worthy reading material, we invite you to join and read along with us. We are better together! For information on how to start or join a Well-Read Mom group visit our website wellreadmom.com
